these days to thrive. And here was one that didn’t appear in the search results at all. Almost as if it were hiding.
He pulled up the address for Associated Languages School on Google StreetView. The building was under renovation, being converted into condos.
So much for Associated Languages School. It was a sham.
The computer kept checking its digital rogues’ gallery for a facial match on the two women.
He grabbed a soda from the refrigerator and returned to his office. And he activated the camera.
Lucy Capra lay in her bed, the wires and the feeds branching about her. She rested on her side; the nurses must have come in and moved her, regular as clockwork. He could see the savage scar along her skull, the mark where the bullet had left its fragments, her ticket to this long limbo of sleep. It had torn her soul and mind away, if not her body. The monitoring camera was fixed in place. He looked in on her once a day, sometimes more. He wondered why he did. It was a thing he would not have told Sam.
He didn’t love Lucy. He had toyed with loving her once, but then she and Sam got involved and he’d taken what he’d felt for her and put it away, like a gift you can’t use gets put on a shelf. And in his moments of shame he thought: thank God she didn’t pick me. How different his life would have been; he might have been the one caught in this awful limbo instead of Sam.
But he could not understand why she had done what she did, why she had betrayed everything. Sam told him she claimed it was money. Money; it boggled August. She was lost in a shadow world, a nothingness where he suspected not even dreams intruded. But he knew that if she could have risen from the bed in pursuit of her child she would have.
He turned off the camera to see what the facial software kicked back to him, to see what news the field reports held.
And then his phone rang.
58
August stared at the number on the cell. Blocked. ‘Hello?’ he answered.
‘You screwed me,’ the informant yelled. ‘You screwed up!’
‘I’m sorry, Jack.’
A shocked pause. ‘And oh, great, screw-up, now you know my name.’
‘Yes. We do. All we want to do is help you.’
‘All you did was nearly get me killed. Do you know what I’ve been through?’ Jack’s voice quavered.
‘Come in to us. We can protect you. I’m sorry, I didn’t know the surrender had been compromised… ’
‘Well, clearly not. You’re an idiot. Do you know how he knew?’
‘No. But the man that is after you is ex-CIA.’
‘Yes, and you’re going to stop him from coming after me.’
‘What?’
‘He’s agreed to meet me tomorrow at three at the Statue of Liberty. Be there, grab him, arrest him and this woman who’s with him, who, incidentally, also tried to kill me, and then maybe we can talk.’
‘You talked to Sam?’
‘They took my computer and I erased it long-distance. But first I set up a meeting with him, you’re welcome, now take him out. I’ve done your hard work for you.’
‘He’s after you because Novem Soles has his infant child as a hostage.’
Silence. In the background August could hear a pulse of music, a hiss of traffic. ‘I’m sorry for that, I am, but it’s not my problem. Sam Capra is your problem now. You want Novem Soles, you take this guy down and then maybe I’ll think about coming out of hiding.’
‘Okay. Part of the info you can turn over to me: does any of it include anything on his kid?’
A long hesitation. ‘Why should I tell you anything?’ His voice went to a low whisper. ‘How do I know you’re not the one compromising me, selling me out?’
‘Well, you don’t. You called me.’
Silence again. ‘Sam Capra said my mom’s dead.’
August digested this. ‘Then it’s true. He wouldn’t lie about it. I’m sorry, Jack.’
‘He said her body could be found at the only house on River Run Road in Morris County. Will you go get my mom’s body, please?’ Jagged breathing now.
‘Yes, of course,’ August said. ‘You come in, now, though, let us protect you.’
‘If he’s telling me the truth about my mom, maybe I’ll tell him what this notebook says about his kid, once you have him in custody. I’ll call you back later.’
Jack Ming hung up.
August checked the address, in rural New Jersey, on a satellite map program. A large house, on acreage, with a good-sized pond. He scoured the database for an owner.
Associated Languages School.
He stood. He should tell Braun, pull Griffith down, get a team together.
You’ve been compromised.
But someone in this office was a leak. Maybe he wouldn’t tell anyone. He sat down, though, and entered in a report on what he had found so far. He passworded it and secured it on the private Special Projects network.
Then he looked up. Braun stood in his doorway. Not holding his collection of cell phones, not pleading Special Projects’ case.
‘We need to talk. My office. Now.’
59
Special Projects headquarters, Manhattan
‘Do you know what they called me in the old days, August?’ Ricardo Braun asked.
‘No, sir.’ August could hardly get the words out.
‘Mr Ideas. I was the one with the fresh ideas, I was willing to try what was never tried before inside the Company. Do you know how hard it is to innovate inside a large bureaucracy?’
‘It’s difficult.’ He wondered where this was leading.
‘Special Projects was my idea. I tested many ideas for ways for the Company to fulfill its duty, do its work, the most important work in this nation.’ Braun paused. ‘Not every idea is a success, of course, but you must have a willingness to try, to fail, and to learn from that failure.’
Maybe, August thought, this was a talk about redemption.
‘I failed today, sir,’ August said.
‘You did. And I’ve been trying to come up with an idea or an innovation that will save you, Mr Holdwine, and I am failing.’ Braun cleared his throat. ‘I want to be sure I understand the unfolding of events. You came into a rendezvous site to meet possibly the most important informant we could get on Novem Soles and you failed to secure it. You saw a former officer on the site, one who you knew could be under the control of a hostile group, and you did not secure him.’
‘He appeared to be unarmed, sir. He had clearly been in a fight.’
‘Appeared. He beat you up and then he nearly killed your informant. I’ve just spent the past hour on the phone to Langley, trying to explain how we failed to capture a computer geek and how that resulted in open warfare on the streets of Brooklyn.’ Braun crossed his arms. ‘You understand, we’re not supposed to be operating on American soil. We are breaking laws here, August, for the common good. We all take that risk that it could come back and bite us. And here your team is, screwing up, and putting our entire branch at risk.’
‘Sam Capra killed those two women who apparently wanted to kill Ming. It could be argued he saved Ming’s life.’
